]]>New Plugin for WordPress: Show Thumbnails in the Posts Listhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2012/04/26/new-plugin-for-wordpress-show-thumbnails-in-the-posts-list/
Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:00:08 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=28997Continue reading →]]>If you use Featured Images for posts in your WordPress site, you can now enable a plugin for your site that will show these images to you on the All Posts page in the administration interface for your site. This can help you quickly identify posts in the list. The name of the plugin is “Midd Post Thumbnails”. Simply activate it on the Plugins administration page and your posts list will now look something like this.

]]>Reduced comment spam in blogshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2012/02/21/reduced-comment-spam-in-blogs/
Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:56:47 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=28241Continue reading →]]>During the past few months we have been seeing an increased amount of comment spam coming into WordPress (sites.middlebury.edu) that follows a distinctive pattern: the comment text is useless, but unoffensive and contains no links itself, while the Comment Author Website field contains the URL of a commercial site. Because the comment text doesn’t contain any links, the comment doesn’t get picked up by WordPress’s existing spam filters and until now would be held for moderation.

You made some respectable points there. I regarded on the web for the issue and found most individuals will go together with with your website.

The point of these spam comments is to use the Comment Author Website field to plaster the web with links back to the spammer’s site in order to make the site seem more popular to search engines.

WordPress’s built-in anti-spam tools ignore the Comment Author Website field and only look at links in the comment text. This used to be sufficient since it is unlikely that most readers will click on the comment-author’s name and follow through to their website. As well, adding links in the comment text allowed spammers better control in how to present the link so that it had the most impact on search engines. Because of the success in filtering of the comment text, spammers have now moved on to other techniques, just trying to get their links to exist anywhere on the page, even if they aren’t ideally positioned.

To combat this form of spam we have removed the Comment Author Website field from the comment form. There are few legitimate needs for this field and it was originally added to allow people to link back to their own blogs — a nice feature, but not necessary. By removing this “attractive nuisance” we can instantly mark as spam any comments that submit a value for the Comment Author Website even though this field is no longer shown in the form.

As of today, this type of comment spam will no longer even be held for moderation — it will be dropped into the “spam” category right away. In the first two hours since this change has been in place it has blocked 70 spam comments that would otherwise have required moderation by the target blogs’ administrators.

]]>New Themes Available for sites.middlebury.eduhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2012/02/20/new-themes-available-for-sites.middlebury.edu/
Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:26:01 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=28228Continue reading →]]>I’ve added 132 new themes to our instance of WordPress that can be used for your department, course, and personal blogs. The eight themes that we previously had have been renamed #1-8 so that they show up first in the list, followed by the new options. If you need a theme with a particular color, layout, or features, click the “Feature Filter” link on the right side of the Themes page and check the boxes that apply to your needs.

You can click on one of the thumbnails in the Themes page to see a preview of your blog in the new theme.

If you want to blog, but the Middlebury blogging network is lacking something you need, let us know.

]]>New Social Media Tools in sites.middlebury.eduhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2012/02/10/new-social-media-tools-in-sites.middlebury.edu/
Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:37:29 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=28153Continue reading →]]>I’ve added two new plugins today that you can use to connect your blog on sites.middlebury.edu with people through social media. In this post, I’ll describe what they do as well as cover a couple of options we’ve had for a while that you might not know about. For official organizational blogs, like this one, I’ve got an officially-ish Facebook app and ShareThis and Disqus accounts ready to go, so talk to me first.

ShareThis

The ShareThis plugin adds buttons to the top or bottom of your posts and/or pages that people can click on to share the post with many social media sites. These buttons appear at the bottom of this post, even. You can choose which buttons appear and pick between several different button styles. ShareThis also lets you track how often your content is shared this way and how many people it reaches.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools provides two-way communication between your blog and Twitter. You can use this to send out a tweet any time you write a new blog post, so your followers know when you’ve put up new content. You can also have it create a blog post from each of your tweets or a digest post at the end of the day with all of your tweets from that day. This plugin also comes with a widget you can put in your sidebar to show your latest tweets.

Simple Facebook Connect

The Simple Facebook Connect plugin is now available for you to enable on any sites.middlebury.edu blog. The plugin has a number of features, one of the most useful is an option to automatically publish posts to your Facebook profile or Fan Page. There is also an option (if you turn that publishing on) to import comments made on those Facebook posts back into the blog. It also has the usual assortment of Like Buttons, Share Boxes, and Facebook Wall widgets. You can also turn on a tab in the Media pane that lets you include images from your Facebook Photo Albums in your posts.

Disqus Commenting System

The Disqus plugin replaces your normal WordPress comment form with a form that lets people post comments as guests, or by signing into one of several other accounts they may have (Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, or any other service that proivdes an Open ID authentication system). You can see this now on MiddLab. Be aware that this removes the ability to post using your Middlebury account, so it is not a good option for private blogs and course blogs.

]]>sites.middlebury.edu now on WordPress 3.3.1http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2012/01/18/sites.middlebury.edu-now-on-wordpress-3-3-1/
Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:47:37 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27867Continue reading →]]>We made the upgrade yesterday to WordPress 3.3 (and 3.3.1). The video below gives an introduction to the changes and new features in version 3.3. We tested as many features as we could think of before applying this change, but please let us know if something’s not working as it should be.

As an added bonus, we now show videos from MiddMedia using the HTML5 video player in browsers supporting WebM playback: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and browsers on Android devices. Internet Explorer 9, Safari and iOS users also get the HTML5 video player, playing the video in MP4 format while Internet Explorer 7 and 8 users will still see the flash-based player.

]]>Curricular Technology J-term Workshops for Facultyhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/19/curricular-technology-j-term-workshops-for-faculty/
Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:09:06 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27575Continue reading →]]>LIS Technologists and Liaisons will be offering more workshop in J-term on Moodle and WordPress, as well as general technology work sessions where faculty can get assistance on using any platform supported by LIS. There will also be workshops on migrating Segue sites to these other platforms. For more information, see: Segue from Segue > Workshops

]]>Aesthetics of the Moving Imagehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/08/aesthetics-of-the-moving-image/
Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:23:43 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27490Continue reading →]]>Louisa Stein is an assistant professor of Film and Media Culture. In the spring of 2010, I interviewed Prof. Stein about her use of technology in a number of her courses. Below is a screencast from that interview that describes her use of WordPress and Moodle in a first year seminar course on the “Aesthetics of the Moving Image.”.

]]>Course Hub Case Studieshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/01/course-hub-case-studies/
Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:09:34 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27434Continue reading →]]>The Course Hub is being actively used by a variety of courses this fall. To give a sense of the different ways faculty are using this new platform, we’ve made a short screencast that shows a number of courses and some the resources they have linked to their course hub sites.

]]>Curricular Technology Workshops in Decemberhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/2011/12/01/curricular-technology-workshops-in-december/
Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:30:39 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/lis/?p=27406Continue reading →]]>The Curricular Technology team has scheduled workshops and work sessions for faculty on various platforms that are available for teaching and learning. Workshops typically provide overviews of a given platform. Work sessions are designed to provide hands on support and consultation.